Generally, the dramatic growth in use of the Internet has likewise seen a dramatic growth in the amount of information which can be distributed from a Web server to a user. As such, a key factor in optimizing distribution efficiency is reducing the amount of time required by a server to construct or generate a particular Web page requested by a user.
In the past, this factor has acted as a barrier to allowing users the ability to personalize or tailor their individual Web pages with specialized information because the need for the server to constantly retrieve the specialized information every time a page was generated significantly increased server response time. Increased response time adds cost to the operation of the system, and also taxes limited system resources.
While caching has been utilized in an attempt to decrease the server response time, such caching arrangements do not improve efficiency of distributing personalized or customized Web pages. More specifically, both caching of the information stored in a database accessed by a server based on classification or categorization of content, i.e., "object caching," and caching of previously constructed pages which are likely to be distributed again have been employed to improve distribution efficiency.
In both instances, any specialized information added by way of page personalization would still need to be retrieved from the database each time the page were distributed to the user. Thus, a need still exists for improving distribution efficiency and server response time so that a user can have the option of personalizing individual Web pages.